What "back wages found due" means

The Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor enforces the Fair Labor Standards Act (minimum wage, overtime, child labor), the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, the wage provisions of the H-1B, H-2A and H-2B programmes, and the prevailing-wage laws for federal contracts (Davis-Bacon, Service Contract Act, Contract Work Hours and Safety Standards Act) among others.

How a case concludes

An investigation may start with a complaint or be directed at a low-wage industry. When investigators find violations, they compute the wages the law required but the employer did not pay; the employer may agree to pay them, and the case concludes with a findings end date. The enforcement file records, for each concluded case, the number of violations, the back wages agreed to pay, the number of employees due back wages, and any civil money penalties assessed, broken down by act.

What the amounts are not

The file does not say whether the agreed amount was subsequently paid, whether the employer disputed the findings elsewhere, or anything about the employer's conduct beyond the violation counts. A case with zero back wages and zero violations is a case that concluded without findings. This site uses the division's own terms, and shows every case as "concluded" because every case in the file is.

Reading the counts

Cases are recorded against the employer name and address on the file, so a chain's cases are spread across its locations and states; the amounts on a state or industry page sum every case there. Back wages per case and per employee are shown beside the state and national figures for comparison.